Chapter One

All Couples Fight

“Someday I’ll write a Story about All the Characters in the Bar “

—Joe the Bartender, AKA. Dad”

From the time I was a toddler until I turned eleven, I lived in a spacious apartment above The Royal Gardens Restaurant and Bar in Bensalem, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. My family’s business seemed set apart from the world, located across the street from the Roosevelt Jewish Cemetery and bordered by the Lincoln Highway, a perilous speedway where cars sped by like lightening all hours of the day and night. If you walked along that highway, you were asking for trouble.

Sometimes I thought I heard the people in the cemetery calling out to me at night. They mostly said stuff like, “Don’t be sad for us. Things are better where we are now and much easier, so don’t be afraid of life, death, and ever after. It’s all good.” Was I hearing voices, or were their visitations a precursor of my interest in the unseen world and psychic phenomena, like Tarot, angel cards and Reiki healing?

When I attended Our Lady of Grace School, I’d learned about Saint Joan of Arc, who heard voices, but I definitely wasn’t in that category. Maybe I’d inherited Dad’s mental problems. Whatever it was, I kept the voices to myself, or Mom would have had my head examined by one of the psychiatrists who trekked to their favorite taproom every day after their harrowing shifts at Byberry Mental Hospital, the area’s main landmark.

Most kids who grew up in Philly or on the outskirts lived in smacked-together brick-front row homes or sprawling ranch houses on tree-lined streets in the suburbs, where they played ball and horsed around with kids their age. I lived on a dangerous highway, so parents hesitated to bring their kids over for playdates or sleepovers for fear they might get hurt or killed.

My friends were mainly the people who worked at The Royal Gardens, like Miss Laura, the cleaning lady, and Miss Clara, the waitress. My other friends were the psychiatrists and attendants at Byberry Hospital who visited the bar every day. Once in a while, a patient slipped in, but few people noticed the difference. Usually they were funny, and we had some good conversations. That’s okay because all these people were better friends than kids sometimes.

Before moving to the Royal Gardens, we lived in army housing in Miami Beach, Florida. My dad, whom everyone called “Joe the Bartender,” although his baptismal name was Emidio Joseph, was an army officer who worked as a supervisor in the army mess hall, where the servicemen and women ate.

Dad, whose first language was Italian, excelled in school and loved Latin and Greek. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and majored in law. He ended up running The Royal Gardens restaurant and bar because he suffered from depression and anxiety that doctors later diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, then called manic-depression. No one knew, except his family. He was great at hiding it.

Pop Pop, my grandfather, who owned a farm down the road and sold his wares, like lettuce, tomatoes, corn, and strawberries, from the back of his pick-up truck, said it would be best for Dad if he set him up in a business; in this case, as a proprietor of a restaurant and bar. A job like lawyer or professor might trigger serious depressive and anxiety attacks, “Make-a-him go to Byberry Hospital” was the way Pop Pop put it in broken English, tapping his head twice with his index finger for emphasis. He would do anything for his kids, so there was no question he’d look out for Dad.

An enormous red, white, and green Royal Gardens sign swung back and forth outside my bedroom window in the apartment above the bar in a clangy, trochaic rhythm. Whee, woo, whee woo, it sang all through the night into the wee hours of the morning, lulling me into a dreamless sleep (except for my frequent visits from the dead in Roosevelt Cemetery) until it was time to wake up at seven a.m.

That’s when my mom, Mary Grace, the cook, server, and main troubleshooter, ambled downstairs in her white uniform and hairnet to prep the food in the restaurant for its 11 o’clock opening. Every morning, Mom cooked a breakfast of sausage, scrambled eggs, and coffee for her and Dad, and cinnamon toast with hot chocolate and marshmallows for me.

My mom, known as Grace, was billed a top student at Eastern High, an academic high school in Baltimore, Maryland. She wanted to attend college and become an interpreter for the United Nations. She had stunning classic looks: wavy brown hair, huge almond-shaped brown eyes, and all the guys loved her. Mom’s main interest was going to college and having a successful career. Marriage could wait, or so she thought.

Back in the day as was the custom, her family sent the boys to college, rather than the girls. She had two brothers, Joe and Nick. Joe sold cars and eventually opened his own business, becoming one of the most successful car dealers on the east coast. His brother Nick served in the Navy and eventually became an engineer after graduating from Johns Hopkins and MIT and became vice-president and general manager at Lockheed Martin.

Mom’s family all came from Baltimore, Maryland. Mom had three sisters, and they were all best friends. Aunt Diana, the oldest, got married later in life, and had six kids after age 40. She started her own successful elder care business, and her husband became a happy househusband while she grew her business.

She was a liberated woman before her time, walking in the footsteps of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Her sister, Marguerite, grew orchids and sold them from her greenhouse for weddings and other celebrations, while the youngest, Monica, worked her way from teacher to superintendent of Palm Beach County Schools, and she also raised three kids. Monica was born when they were all grown up.

Mom’s family was a high-achieving family, so Mom wanted to imitate her sisters and have a professional job in addition to raising a family, but it didn’t happen for her after she met my dad. Everyone thought that my mom would have a successful career, and in a way she did. Being the co-boss, cook, waitress, and occasional bartender at The Royal Gardens wasn’t in her plans although she made the best of it.

When Mom was eighteen, she worked as a head secretary for the military. She met my dad when they worked in the same office where he was a second lieutenant, and she worked as a secretary. It was love at first sight for both of them. Dad was Mom’s boss at the base, and she found his Latin looks and outgoing personality charming and irresistible, just as he loved her quiet ways and shy, endearing smile. In less than six months, they got engaged and married in a nuptial mass with bridesmaids, ushers, and baskets of gardenias and roses, Mom’s favorite flowers.

Mom loved to tell us stories about their courtship. “He’d buy me a nickel Coke and try to squeeze it out of me on our dates, but that’s as far as it went.” It was important to her as a good Catholic girl to save herself for marriage.

She didn’t know how to cook when she married Dad but decided to become the restaurant’s chef when Fred, the cook, and the dismal procession that followed, dipped their ladles into the spaghetti sauce and slurped a generous swig of the fragrant tomato gravy, which is what they call it in South Philly, heavy with the scents of fresh rosemary and garlic.

“Um-umm,” or “delish,” the cooks proclaimed when sampling their culinary creations, dumping their spoons and slimy saliva back into the pot. Mom cringed and told them to stop, or the board of health would come after us, but they never did.

“That’s why it tastes so good, Miss Grace,” Fred the cook told her, smiling widely. “A little spit never hurt anyone.”

She and Dad decided they had to do something about the spoon-licking, so they fired the cooks, one by one. What would their customers say if they knew? It was bad enough that Mom and Dad knew. Luckily, Mom watched the chefs prepare comfort food specialties, such as lasagna, roast turkey, rib roast, and crispy steak fries (the secret was in the blanching process). She knew how to make all her customers’ favorites, and she began to add new touches of her own. Customers raved about her specialties even more than those of Fred, the cook, and the other chefs. She was a natural. People craved Mom’s cooking and traveled miles to sample it.

Mom expertly prepared lasagna, meat loaf, roast beef, savory soups, and desserts like her orange cake, for her customers, just as she would for her family. My parents hosted huge dinners for the Lions and Kiwanis clubs as well as small, intimate suppers for couples, along with family dinners, in their spacious dining room for anniversaries and birthdays. People always asked for her recipes, which I have included in the appendix of this book, and she willingly shared them. “I’ll never understand why people don’t want to divulge their recipes,” Mom said once. “I consider it the highest compliment and want everyone to enjoy them and pass them on to others.” Mom was always generous to others, and we found it always came back to her in good ways.

Every morning, except for Sunday when we closed, Miss Laura, the cleaning lady, let herself in after getting her kids off to school and walking a mile to work. Dad always picked her up in bad weather. One morning she shook her head when she saw Dad stocking the bar. “Mr. Joe, you’d better tell those guys who use the bathroom to aim straight when they pee. I’m sick of cleaning up their stinky mess.”

“Good luck with that,” Dad said with a smile.

But Miss Laura wouldn’t be put off because she always got the last word. “I’m serious, Mr. Joe. Either say something or you won’t see Miss Laura come Monday. I’ll get a job on the cleaning crew at the Holiday Inn down the road. I’ve got connections there. They already offered me a job with benefits, in case you didn’t know.”

“We certainly wouldn’t want to lose you to The Holiday Inn,” Mom said. “Besides, I don’t think you’d like it there. I heard they have nasty bed bugs that latch on to you and leave you itching all day.”

“For real?” Miss Laura flashed her dark eyes at Mom. “You know I love you, Miss Grace, but I can tell when you’re lying.”

“How’s that, Miss Laura?”

“Your face gets blotchy red, and your nose grows like Pinocchio’s.”

Mom rolled her eyes and turned to Dad. “Do something, Joe. We can’t afford to lose our best employee.”

Dad shot Miss Laura a somber look. “Okay, then. I’ll give those guys the word about peeing straight into the pot if you promise not to leave.”

Miss Laura dipped her mop in the bucket and sloshed it around in the soapy water, splashing Dad in the process, probably on purpose. “Aww, you know I’d never leave, Mr. Joe. Besides, I love Catherine. I enjoy hearing her funny stories about those shrinks and attendants at Byberry Mental Hospital, although it seems to me that a few of them act a lot like the patients who sneak in here sometimes. Most of all, I love that Elvis music she plays on the jukebox. We both predicted “Heartbreak Hotel” would be a big hit and it was. We’re a team, you know.”

I ran to Miss Laura, and she hugged me so hard I could hear my bones creak, but she was my friend so that was fine, and we told each other secrets and laughed at the characters at the bar behind their backs, so I didn’t say anything.

Shortly before Dad died, he told me that someday he’d write about all the characters in the bar. He never got around to it, so I guess I’m the one to tell what it was like living at The Royal Gardens. However, my story will be different from his. I wonder how he would have told it. I’ll never know for sure, but I think he’d say he had a rollicking time everyday schmoozing with the psychiatrists and attendants that patronized The Royal Gardens.

He’d probably say that if he’d become a lawyer or a professor of languages as he’d planned, it would have bored him out of his brain and that he’d never have the adventures he experienced being the proprietor of The Royal Gardens. Most of all, despite the ups and downs of the business and the demons that haunted him, he’d say he’d miss working side by side with Mom, whom he loved dearly, even though he had a strange way of showing it sometimes and depended on her to keep the business going.

I learned early on that Mom and Dad’s relationship was anything but smooth. Mom actually walked out on Dad a couple of times. Once, when I was a baby and she could no longer abide his mercurial moods, tantrums, and demands, she bundled me up. We set out by train for Baltimore, her hometown, so she could gain perspective about how she wanted to live the rest of her life because the way it was playing out wasn’t working for her.

The first time Mom left Dad, she hitchhiked to the train station in Philly to reach her family home in Maryland. Her mother Carmella, hounded by her sister-in-law, Aunt Lena. who’d never married or had kids said, “You need to go home and work things out with your husband.” After a week, Mom caught the next train home with baby me in tow. The family who pleaded with her every day to come back to The Royal Gardens, telling her how much he missed us. Although we were gone for a short time, that must have seemed like forever to him.

However, before long, Dad regressed into his old patterns of stinginess and criticism if everything wasn’t exactly to his liking: his dinner, her clothes, and the way she interacted with the customers. Once he accused her of flirting with a man at the bar who had no teeth, horrible BO, and showed off his muscles by wearing sleeveless t-shirts.

If dinner wasn’t on the table at the same time every night, he’d berate Mom. “What is wrong with you? I’m starved from working all day. My dinner should be ready before the next wave of customers shows up. Is that too much to ask?”

Mom walked out on Dad a second time, a couple of years after we’d moved to a suburban ranch house with three bedrooms, one bath (where everyone seemed to sequester every time I had to pee), and an acre of lush ground where Mom planted red roses and geraniums, and put up a clothesline where the sheets flapped around in the breeze every day the sun came out. One day, Dad and I bordered the pavement with purple and yellow pansies. It’s one of the happiest days I spent with Dad. I still have a picture.

I was sixteen and a junior in high school with a brother seven years younger and a sister who was born when my parents were ancient by my standards. My sister was still a baby when Mom asked me to join her in the yard so she could tell me that she’d be leaving for the weekend. She spilled her sorrow as we stood by the clothesline, the sheets flapping against our faces in the breeze. She said she’d received an anonymous phone call from a rough-and tumble-sounding woman named Ada, who claimed she was having an affair with my father.

Mom made a couple of phone calls to verify what the woman told her and found it plausible that my dad was involved with this woman, who seemed, from the way Mom described her, to be the antithesis of Mom with her brassy tone, poor grammar, and cocky attitude.

Again, Mom decided to take off for Baltimore, her childhood home. My grandmother and Aunt Lena had died years before, so there was no one to stop Mom from leaving Dad and staying as long as she wanted. Her family embraced her and invited her to stay with them until she could decide what to do about Dad cheating on her.

Feeling guilty for leaving my brother and me to care for our baby sister, she arrived home after a weekend in a state of confusion, not knowing any more about what to do than when she left. I was so happy to see Mom back that I couldn’t stop laughing and crying all day. I made her promise never to leave again no matter what, and she hugged me so tight she almost broke my bones, and said, “I promise.” She kept that promise until her final day on earth.

My brother, a child himself, and I took turns caring for our sister in Mom’s absence. I admit that I was not the best caregiver for a baby as I fumbled when changing her diapers and feeding her. I’d never enjoyed babysitting or any of my mom’s other domestic talents even though I loved my sister dearly.

My father often blasted me out because of this shortcoming. According to him, the main reason women were on earth was to serve men and raise the kids. He couldn’t stand that I had different ideas. When Mom left the second time, I was frying burgers on the stove when the skillet caught fire. My brother acted quickly and doused the fire with a pail of water.

“You can’t do anything right,” Dad shouted, surveying the damage and charred burgers. “How can you ever hope to be a good wife or mother like your mom.

“I’m going to go to college and get a great job so I don’t have to be a maid like you expect Mom to be,” I shouted back. He repeated that I was an abysmal failure and told me how I bungled everything I touched. Dad loved repeating things. He didn’t talk to me the rest of the time Mom was away, and I was glad.

Back when we lived at the Royal Gardens, Mom often worked ten hours a day with no paycheck. If she needed money, she’d ask Dad for the exact amount she needed to pay bills, and he’d dole it out. If he thought her request was justified, he’d count the money out in Italian, slapping each bill on her hand with a dramatic flourish: “Uno, due, tre, quattro…”

If Dad didn’t feel that Mom needed the money that day, she was forced to scrimp and scramble to make ends meet even though my parents reaped a modest profit from their business. Although many women in those days kowtowed to their husbands, even as a child, I always felt that their marriage was out of whack. Unlike most of the other kids’ moms, she never had any mad money to spend on clothes or little luxuries she wanted, like movies, make-up, or lunch out with her lady friends.

Why should Mom get short-changed? Why did I have to hear her crying in her bedroom at night after Dad made her unhappy during the day? Dad always stayed at the bar until one in the morning and then went out barhopping to after-hours clubs after he shooed everyone out of his bar. Because Dad had boundless energy, he was able to get by on very little sleep.

Mom often spent her evenings alone or with me, listening to scary radio shows, like “Inner Sanctum,” “The Fat Man,” and “The Creaking Door.” Nightly, we turned on our radio and a monologue like this chilled me: “We bring you the tops in spine chillers (enter the sound of the creaking door).” I was so scared I almost peed myself. Mom laughed at the host’s theatrics, but my eyes widened in fear.

Dad usually returned home to our apartment about three hours before the light peeked through my window. I saw the sadness in Mom’s face as I heard his key in the door, but she and Dad just said “hi” when he came upstairs. We said good night, and I traipsed to my room to await the whee woo sound of the Royal Gardens sign and the dead reaching out to me from the Roosevelt cemetery to let me know everything would turn out all right no matter what.

Dad smiled and joked with his customers who loved him, but he could be a tyrant with Mom, ordering her around and telling her she didn’t measure up. When they’d argue, I’d sometimes seek out Miss Laura and bury my head in her roomy apron. “Now, now, honey,” she’d say. “They don’t mean anything by it. All couples fight, but I know they love each other, and they’ll stay together no matter what. So, no need to worry. And besides, Miss Laura is always here for you. You know that baby.”

By seeing how my parents coped with one another’s disparate personalities and dealt with their conflicts, I somehow learned that it’s important to work through problems in a marriage, no matter how impossible they seem. I don’t think they ever got to that point, but they loved each other in their own way, even though many observers might not see it as a healthy kind of love. I could tell it wasn’t.